Mobilizing Mainstream Islam: The Politics of Orthodoxy in Indonesia in Comparative Perspective (book launch)
Mobilizing Mainstream Islam (Cornell University Press 2026) explains the rise and changing shape of religious nationalism in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto in 1998.
In the 2000s, a time of electoral democratization, Indonesia's religious and political landscape experienced significant competition and reshuffling as religious and political elites formed an alliance to challenge Indonesia's official policies of tolerance and religious pluralism.
As Dr. Saskia Schäfer argues, state and religious authorities have in the post-Suharto era constructed a homogenized, bureaucratized form of Islam—which she terms "Mainstream Islam"—that deliberately marginalizes people framed as minorities, such as Ahmadiyya, Shia Muslims and LGBTQI-identifying people, through securitization and theological delegitimization. She shows how the discourses of human rights have only sharpened the contours of these identities within the national imaginary.
Through diverse case studies, Mobilizing Mainstream Islam explores how competitive electoral politics, decentralization, and media fragmentation facilitated the emergence of Islamist majoritarian rule and compares Indonesia's decentralized model with Malaysia's state-driven approach. Schäfer examines how competition over resources and public support shape religious nationalism. As the case of Indonesia illuminates broader global trends of religious nationalism, this book offers fresh insights into the challenges of maintaining pluralism in electoral democracies.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr. Saskia Schäfer's research examines democracy, religious nationalism, and minority politics in comparative perspective. Her book Mobilizing Mainstream Islam: The Politics of Orthodoxy in Indonesia in Comparative Perspective (Cornell University Press 2026) analyzes how political competition in post-Suharto Indonesia drives religious homogenization and exclusion. She currently leads a transdisciplinary research group on civic education and religion at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before that, she directed a research group on secularity, religion, and democracy at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the same university. Earlier, she held postdoctoral positions at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, both at Columbia University and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Dr. phil. in political science from the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
*Banner photo by Alim on Unsplash
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